Posts Tagged ‘touch interface’

It’s been a long running joke that at the beginning of each year, probably for the last twenty years, someone prognosticates that this will be the year of Linux. Often this is prefaced by the year of the Linux desktop or the year of the Linux server. But somehow in spite of all the hype, most desktops are still Windows as are a good number of servers.

I don’t really want to prognosticate that this will necessarily be the year of anything in particular, but recently it appears that everywhere I turn, I see Linux.

Telikin

My wife spent November and December in Arizona with her parents who are snowbirds, since I had quite a bit of business travel going on. Since she was there for 2 months she was determined to get her parents on-line. So they could Google things themselves rather than phoning her, so they could e-mail and use Facebook. So off they went and bought a shiny new Lenovo Windows 8 laptop with a touch screen and all the bells and whistles. This turned out to be quite frustrating and they had all sorts of learning and usage problems. The big one being that the touch interface didn’t work well. So they returned it and got a large screen Windows 7 laptop, which my wife thought would be easier since she knew it better and there was no touch stuff. Didn’t go so well. Then they saw an ad for a Telikin PC which was a special purpose PC for seniors with a touch screen as well as a mouse, with special easy to use software which included senior friendly features like large fonts and large graphics.

This actually worked out quite well. They could do e-mails, browse the web, print, upload photos from their camera and use Facebook. They then asked me about recording audio, so I got a freeware program and went to install it. I imagined that the senior friendly software was just a shell over Windows, and I just needed to figure out how to exit that or run a CMD prompt. No luck. I then Googled the computer and to my surprise found out it was powered by Linux! Apparently Linux is making it into the Desktop in a number of special purpose PCs. I then had to point them to a web site that allowed you to make audio recordings and away they went. Further they seem to be able to keep using it now that they are on their own again, since we returned home.

Android

Of course I couldn’t write an article about Linux taking over without mentioning Google’s Android operating system for phones and tablets. Last September, Google announced that 500 million Android devices have now been activated. That’s an amazing number. Basically Android is proving to be the market leader in both smart phones and tablets. Samsung has experienced tremendous growth with their Android devices.

ChromeOS

For laptops, Google is promoting their ChromeOS which is a minimal Linux based computer that is more oriented being a web browser. Surprisingly ChromeOS based laptops have topped the Amazon best seller lists for laptops in recent months. These are special purpose devices, but are gaining quite a bit of traction.

Tizen

Tizen is another open source Linux based smart phone operating system. This is being promoted as even more open than Android. It is being picked up by several Chinese phone manufacturers as well Samsung has announced they will be releasing Tizen based phones. Partly this is in reaction to Google shipping Google branded devices in competition to their hardware partners.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu has been a leading Linux distribution that has gained quite a bit of traction on the desktop. It is a full distribution of Linux and not one of the special purpose limited sets. Now Ubuntu is developing a smart phone version of their Linux version. The idea is that when the phone is mobile it runs a limited set of programs in a manner similar to Android or Tizen, but when you dock the phone and it’s connected to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, then you get the full Ubuntu distribution. This way your phone is also your laptop and tablet.

This is rather an interesting idea that the phone is your computing core with all your files and programs on it. Then depending on the hardware, connectivity and power you get the subset that is appropriate for that usage.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a $25 computer that is oriented to hobbyists. It is based on the ARM CPU and runs Linux. The Raspberry Pi doesn’t even come in a box. But since it just recently went on sale, it’s already sold 1 million units. This has certainly woken up the home hardware hobby industry and I suspect the core design of this will end up in many other devices.

Everything Else

At the recent CES show, there seemed to be a plethora of special purpose Linux based appliances from intelligent fridges to Linux being the operating system for your car. I don’t know how many of these will be successful but it appears that nearly everything is getting a CPU, memory and connectivity. Whether these have any lasting value or are short term gimmicks is yet to be seen.

Programming

As a programmer we want all our programs to run in as many places as possible. These days the market has become quite fragmented between Windows, MacOS, iOS and then all the Linuxes. One way to program for all these devices is to use HTML5/JavaScript since they all have Internet connectivity and good browsers like Firefox or Chrome. Another way is to use Java which runs on all these as well. For Windows, Linux and MacOS you can also use C/C++ and just isolate the operating system dependent parts in separate modules to handle differences in things like mutexes and file locking. Unfortunately besides using HTML5/JavaScript the preferred native way to create User Interfaces is completely different on all of these and tends to lead to very different ways of doing things.

Summary

It seems that Linux has been making inroads slowly in all sorts of places. Now all of a sudden it seems to be everywhere. I think this is a great tribute to what can be accomplished with open source software and how a great many profitable ventures can be based on it.